Waking up to Wisdom In Stillness and Community

Truth is a Pathless Land

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

I maintain that no organization can lead man to spirituality. If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth.

Organizations cannot make you free. No man from outside can make you free; nor can organized worship, nor the immolation of yourselves for a cause, make you free; nor can forming yourselves into an organization, nor throwing yourselves into works, make you free. You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when organizations become your chief concern. "How many members are there in it?" That is the first question I am asked by all newspaper reporters. "How many followers have you? By their number we shall judge whether what you say is true or false." I do not know how many there are. I am not concerned with that. As I said, if there were even one man who had been set free, that were enough. [...]

I have now decided to disband [Order of the Star], as I happen to be its head. You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set man absolutely, unconditionally free.

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1 Previous Reflections:

We had a spontaneous guest speaker, a Gandhian named Dr. Prasad:
How people react depends on the mindset
Basic problem in rural areas -- what do we live for?
We're all responsible for each other
Life based development, not death based development.
If every villager has a cigarette, we can make money but is that progress?
Exploitation has taken subtle forms -- advertisment, marketing
Greed is the base of the problem -- we are creating more and more loss to society.
Instead of creating wealth, our paradigm has come to grabbing maximum wealth. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone's need but not greed.
Some notes from the roundtable:
Are organization are useless? Not always.
As organizations get larger, purity is lost.
Organization can't lead to freedom ... it's not spirituality.
El dorado by Edgar Allan Poe
Truth -- there's no one truth; it's all true. But until we experience it, it's just a belief.
It's not enough to hear somebody's truth.
Words don... [View Full Comment]We had a spontaneous guest speaker, a Gandhian named Dr. Prasad:

How people react depends on the mindset

Basic problem in rural areas -- what do we live for?

We're all responsible for each other

Life based development, not death based development.

If every villager has a cigarette, we can make money but is that progress?

Exploitation has taken subtle forms -- advertisment, marketing

Greed is the base of the problem -- we are creating more and more loss to society.

Instead of creating wealth, our paradigm has come to grabbing maximum wealth. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone's need but not greed.